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Saturday, 16 November 2013

Where are you McMicheal Art Museum?

Today, we went on a road trip to find the McMicheal Canadian Art Collection. According to Google, it was suppose to take 35 minutes so I figured we would get there in 45 minutes, no problem. I put the location in my phone GPS app which has worked surprisingly well for me having no data plan. I grabbed my portable oxygen tank and a water bottle and we set off!

The traffic was moving pretty well so we made excellent time. The GPS notified us that we had 'arrived at our destination' and everything. Except there was no museum. There was a school, a bunch of trees, and a strip mall but no museum. I kept driving thinking that maybe the App had the place off by a few meters or so but nope, nothing. That was when I realized that I should have triple checked that the GPS app actually had the right address. I did a quick glace to compare it to the location on Google but apparently it was too quick. That was also when we realized we had taken our actual paper-doesn't-require-3G-to-work-map out of the car.

So I did what I always do when I'm stranded and need information from the Internet, I called my sister. Except she didn't answer her phone so I then called my parents. We couldn't really tell them where we were other than 'on Islington Rd. somewhere in Vaughan', so all they could do was give us the street number, address, and postal code of the museum. We had the right street name, so where was the museum? We typed the postal code in the GPS and that gave us directions to a location 15 minutes away.

We figured we had no other good option and proceeded to follow those directions which led us past fields and farms into the middle of an industrial park. I knew we were going astray as soon as we left the main road onto some industrial road but figured we should give it a shot. Unsurprisingly, the art museum was not in the middle of the warehouses.

Attempt number 3 meant trying the street intersection in the GPS. It was of course 10 minutes away but that was better than the other side of the city. As soon as we pulled onto 'Islington St.' once again, I knew that we were on the right track. After driving through Kleinburg (which looked adorable and pricy), there was the museum! Hurray!

Lesson of the day: Don't trust the GPS! Turns out we were on the right street (Islington Rd is super long) but just had no idea how far up we were suppose to be. We are going to get a good road map of Ontario asap.

The museum was good, just the right size for me to get through before getting tired. There were only three rooms for the 'Group of 7' art which was surprising seeing as I thought it was their museum. The other stuff was pretty cool though. One of the rooms had paintings where the artists 're-imagined the works of Tom Thompson' which I have interpreted to mean reconstructing the painting using a lot of paint to give it a '3D' effect and add in some people in the background. Except the people had globs of paint as faces which was a bit unnerving. A girl kept walking around screaming 'zombie!' when she saw one which was pretty much my reaction too except without the screaming. If I hadn't been told to stop taking pictures, I would have taken a picture.

Art!

These were depressing dioramas in floating balls about how we all hide our lives from everyone else. In the next room it was all about the rich people live luxuriously while the rest of the world lives in poverty. The third room was about all the horrible things the Natives went through with residential schools. Sigh.